The situation is awful - and getting worse

I just updated my spreadsheet for the first time in four days. I was absolutely astounded at how much worse the numbers were:

1.      My projection for Covid deaths in December jumped from 58,000 to 79,000.

2.      This entailed an increase in the average daily number of deaths from 1,901 to 2,577, which is two deaths every minute.

3.      The 7-day growth rate in deaths jumped from 4.3% to 5.8%.

4.      The 7-day growth rate in cases went from 8.9% to 10.2%.

5.      Here’s the most frightening change of all: The test positivity rate jumped from 10.2% to 28.5%.

I read this morning that the US is likely to have 540,000 deaths by April. However, I think that’s wildly optimistic. If we just keep adding 80,000 deaths per month, as we will likely do in December, we’ll have 320,000 more deaths in January through April. This means we’ll have 670,000 total pandemic deaths by the end of April. And that would imply a drop in the growth rate, since if deaths continue to grow at 6% a week (i.e. more than 24% a month) as they are now, we’ll have about 840,000 deaths by the end of April.

Plus, there’s no reason why the 7-day rate of growth will stay at 6%. Absent any significant additional mitigation measures, it will continue to increase. I talked a lot about exponential growth back in March and April. If left to its will (which is more or less what’s happening in large parts of the country now), this virus grows exponentially. So the 7-day rate of increase itself will likely continue to grow, just as it’s jumped 1.3% in just the last four days. This means there’s a very real chance we’ll be over a million deaths before the summer, which is the earliest that herd immunity might come about due to vaccinations.

It’s becoming almost inevitable that we’ll need to implement a nationwide lockdown, unless more strict measures (like closing bars and restricting restaurants to takeout, as well as universal mask wearing. Oh…also a ban on interstate travel) are taken. We’ve been dilly-dallying for far too long.

Of course, Trump is doing nothing about this, and is in fact doing his best to encourage the spread, like his 25 White House Christmas parties (which aren’t going to happen, at least not on the scale he’s thinking, and not without masks). The terrible cost of his inaction will be clearly visible by the late spring.

The numbers

These numbers are updated every day, based on reported US Covid-19 deaths the day before (taken from the Worldometers.info site, where I’ve been getting my numbers all along). The projections are based on yesterday’s 7-day rate of increase in total Covid-19 deaths, which was 5.8%.

Month

Deaths reported during month

Avg. deaths per day during month

Deaths as percentage of previous month’s

Month of March

4,058

131

 

Month of April

59,812

1,994

1,474%

Month of May

42,327

1,365

71%

Month of June

23,925

798

57%

Month of July

26,649

860

111%

Month of August

30,970

999

116%

Month of Sept.

22,809

760

75%

Month of Oct.

24,332

785

107%

Month of Nov.

38,293

1,276

157%

Month of Dec.

79,882

2,501

209%

Total March-Dec.

354,247

1,154

 

Red = projected numbers

I. Total deaths

Total US deaths as of yesterday: 288,906

Deaths yesterday: 1,076

Percent increase in total deaths in the last seven days: 4.3% (This number is used to project deaths in the table above. There is a 7-day cycle in the reported deaths numbers, caused by lack of reporting over the weekends from closed state offices. So this is the only reliable indicator of a trend in deaths, not the one-day percent increase, which mainly reflects where we are in the 7-day cycle).

II. Total reported cases

Total US reported cases: 15,159,529

Increase in reported cases since previous day: 173,861

Percent increase in reported cases in the last seven days: 10.2%  

III. Deaths as a percentage of closed cases so far in the US:

Total Recoveries in US as of yesterday: 8,855,593

Total Deaths as of yesterday: 288,906

Deaths so far as percentage of closed cases (=deaths + recoveries): 3.2%

For a discussion of what this number means – and why it’s so important – see this post. Short answer: If this percentage declines, that’s good. It’s been steadily declining since a high of 41% at the end of March.

IV. 7-day average of test positive rate for US: 10.2%

For comparison, the previous peak for this rate was 7.8% in late July, although the peak in early April was 22%. The rate got down to 4.0% in early October but has been climbing since then. This is published by Johns Hopkins.

I would love to hear any comments or questions you have on this post. Drop me an email at tom@tomalrich.com.

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The tragedy in India

For a great account of what’s going on in India, read this WaPo article. And read this Atlantic article for a good commentary on how India’s wealthier class ignored the lessons of the 1984 Bhopal disaster and let the health care system stagnate, leaving the country unable to handle this sudden surge in the virus. Although it's wrong to say the system stagnated. For the wealthy, it became (and remains) world-class. Does this remind you of another health care system that, at least in the early days of the pandemic, was overwhelmed?  Both articles call attention to the Modi government’s failures, but they both try to spread the blame around. Yes, others are responsible, but the fact that – after a terrible response to the first wave of the virus – the government got lulled into thinking they’d beaten it, so they could open up completely (including holding big political rallies and allowing the annual Kumbh Mela to take place – this year in Haridwar, which I’ve visited and can ...
Read more

The Indian variant

The numbers keep improving every week. Both new cases and deaths grew at the same 0.7% rate in the past week, vs. 0.9% for both cases and deaths the previous week. And average daily deaths in the past week were 573. For perspective, the last time deaths were this low was March 31, 2020. But given that daily deaths hadn’t gone above 10 until March 15, the fact that they’d accelerated to 468 on March 31 was a bad sign (at the time, my big concern was that total deaths would end up in the low tens of thousands. In fact, they passed 600,000 last week). This morning, WaPo ran a story on the new Indian variant’s arrival in Britain, where it passed 2,000 cases recently. It seems to be at least 50% more transmissible than what we used to call the UK variant, but which is now the dominant variant in both the US and Britain. And that variant in turn easily displaced what had been the previous dominant variant in both countries, since the beginning of the pandemic (in fact, I remember a lot o...
Read more

Deaths and Recoveries

I’m not bothering with my usual Numbers section today, since the 1-day and 7-day rates of increase in deaths and cases haven’t changed at all, and the ratio of deaths to closed cases remains at 17%. The projected deaths numbers are close to what they were yesterday. I haven’t discussed the ratio of deaths to closed cases for a while, although I’ve been reporting it. To refresh your memory, this is the ratio of total Covid-19 deaths so far to “closed cases”; closed cases is the sum of deaths so far and “recoveries” so far. The fact that the US rate is 17% means that, of all closed cases so far in the pandemic, 17% of them have resulted in death. This is down substantially from the initial value of 41%, in late March, when Worldometers started reporting recoveries. But it is still quite high – it seems to mean that, if you’re determined to have a “case” of Covid-19, the odds are close to 1 in 5 that you will die. I’ve been periodically comparing the US performance in this ar...
Read more